


Sonntag et al. (2015)

by rainbow irises (oakleaf)



Series: et al. 'verse [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Accurate science, Alternate Universe - Scientists, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5106101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oakleaf/pseuds/rainbow%20irises
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven perspectives from the FUNHAUS lab.</p><p>aka: the AU where they’re all research psychologists.<br/>Contains accurate science (and swearing, but I'm not bumping the rating for that).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonntag et al. (2015)

**Author's Note:**

> [[tumblr crosspost](http://rainbow-irises.tumblr.com/post/132138383365/fic-sonntag-et-al-2015)]

Some days, everything goes wrong.

Some days, the supercomputer goes down, taking nearly all of their projects with it. It means hours of lost work, and then they have to work out whose work is more important and gets to queue in first.

Some days, the MRI machine is double-booked and they have to fight over it with the other lab while disgruntled trial participants are waiting in the hall.

Some days, there are frustrating collaborators who just won’t email him back, god fucking dammit, and won’t share their data for some bullshit reason or another.

Those are generally the days when Bruce wishes he’d never taken up the challenge of managing his own lab.

But then there are other days.

Other days, when Bruce stays up past midnight, thinking about the best way to proceed with the analysis, and emails back and forth with Joel about it.

There are days when he wanders through the open plan office to check on his underlings and he sees some graph that Sean has open on his monitor, something that fits the prediction almost perfectly.

There are days when, during the lab meeting, Matt shows off some new trick that he’s picked up, or worked out, or programmed himself, and the others start bouncing ideas off each other, working out how best to use it and what improvements could be made.

Those are the days when Bruce thinks, yeah, this was the right choice.

—

Sean has no idea what to expect the first time he walks through the doors of the FUNHAUS lab. He’s greeted by a reception area that looks like a small doctor’s waiting room, but more colourful, orderly and friendly.

“Are you Sean?” comes the question from a man who had been lounging on a seat, fiddling with his phone.

“Yeah.”

“Hi, I’m Bruce. Nice to meet you.”

They shake hands, and Bruce leads him into a small office. There are, like, three whiteboards, one of which is on wheels, and on a cluttered desk sits papers and mugs and a PC with two monitors.

Despite his nervousness, Sean aces the interview, and moves into the lab.

—

Lawrence spends way too much time in front of a screen.

During the day, he’s usually staring at his computer screen, squinting at lines of code. Sometimes he’s perplexed by the lines of red text scrolling down the screen and his fingers fold themselves onto ctrl + C with the ease that comes with too much practice.

Sometimes the text doesn’t move at all and he kind of wants to break his computer with a sledgehammer.

Sometimes, his sprawling code is replaced by graphs and figures.

At night, he bunkers down with his PC or console and games for hours, because that’s apparently what engineers do.

There are some people from his college days who would argue that he’s not much of an engineer any more, but they can go fuck themselves, seriously. They’re probably also the people who still, despite having studied engineering for way too many years, think that civil and mechanical are the only true forms of engineering and think that girls don’t belong in their classes.

As he said, fuck them.

—

Matt has sat back and watched a lot of people pass through the lab.

He’s seen postdocs move through every few years, whether in the FUNHAUS lab or the one down the corridor and around the corner.

He’s seen talented researchers who just can’t cut a break, honours students who work harder than anyone else he’s ever met, and nervous undergrads who aren’t sure they’re cut out for this line of work.

He’s just that postdoc who sits at his desk, who gets called on by Bruce whenever someone new comes and he has to set up their computer accounts.

He watches them as they grow.

He remembers James moving into their lab space halfway through his PhD. They bond over lunches and bad games and Matt helps James work out the kinks in his programming technique.

Matt watches as James grows into becoming a researcher, becoming more confident, coming up with brilliant turns of logic and being oh so passionate about translating his work into something tangible for others.

He watches Lawrence learn how to think like a scientist as well as an engineer, because those two things are subtly different. He emails back and forth with him about the best ways to learn about neuroscience if you haven’t touched biology since high school and which platform has the best games.

—

The most frustrating thing about Adam’s job is trying to find participants. Sometimes, they need to be matched to the sample that he already has and it’s a pain in the ass trying to find a thirty-ish year old male who is able to come into the lab for three two-hour sessions within the space of a month with at least a week between sessions.

The second most frustrating thing is probably the fucking computers with their fucking programs that no one teaches you to use when you’re an undergraduate.

He’d thought he was pretty good with computers, had used them a lot and liked them. But trying to get it to do your bidding and learning to think like a computer, numbers and matrices and optimisation - that was a different matter altogether.

Sometimes he still has to google syntax or read through old documentation. But he’s seen trained computer scientists do that too, so he doesn’t feel too bad about it.

Sometimes, his scripts run like a dream and he breathes out deeply, and smiles.

—

Joel hates grant season with a burning passion.

It’s so incredibly frustrating to write thousands of words justifying why this phenomenon you’ve been studying for years and years is so important.

He’s grateful that he’s working with humans and can actually prove that his research will be able to affect real change in outcomes in humans. He used to work with  _C. elegans_  and while it’s not a completely unknown model organism, it’s still harder to justify why looking at a worm is going to help anyone.

Even though it totally has. More than once, even.

Either way, he still has to write these long-winded documents, then subject them to a tedious process of internal and then external review.

And then he has to wait.

Wait to find out if the lab will be able to keep running into the future, if they’re going to have to let some people go because their research has been deemed not important enough.

And sure, it would be easier if they were working for a private company, but then they wouldn’t have the freedom to study things that are interesting to them.

He’s been there, done that, and would rather not do it again.

—

James didn’t expect to stay at the FUNHAUS lab.

He’d only really moved into the FUNHAUS office because it was closer to the testing facilities and they had helpful people.

He wasn’t supposed to stay - he was officially doing his PhD under a different supervisor but as it became more computationally intense, he’d spent more time around this bunch of computer scientists and engineers, picking up tips and tricks, until he just became comfortable here.

They had the tools he needed to continue doing what he did best - collecting data and trying to make it into something that made sense, making crazy leaps of logic to tie different theories together.

James could probably do that at any other lab in the world. But it wouldn’t be the same without being able to roll his chair over to Matt’s desk and ask about this undecipherable mess of a function, or bugging Joel about this paper that will totally revolutionise this theory, I mean it this time, or arguing with Adam about the Monty Hall problem over lunch.

—

They’re not real psychologists, because they’re not clinical psychologists, in the same way that in another universe they’re not real journalists, because they’re not print journalists.

And they’re not technically neuroscientists either, but close enough.

Either way, whatever the universe, they find each other and they play bad video games, and good video games, and they try to change the world, a little bit at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> [[extended author's notes](http://rainbow-irises.tumblr.com/post/132138374375/fic-notes-sonntag-et-al-2015)]


End file.
